This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Monday, March 16, 2009

No end to the evil, I guess ...

I rarely just swatch stuff from other blogs, but I am just trying to get back to regular blogging after an absence (thanks to all who have enquired; my mother is making a good recovery,though at her age it takes time). So I am working my way through the In Box.

More from the evil Discos, with my comment below:

"Evolution: No Controversy? ? No Funding"

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has his response to The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology's boycott of Louisiana after the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act:

Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don?t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They don?t share your passion for ideological purity in science classes. They have a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions, and their insistence on academic freedom is catching on. They don't want religion taught in the science classroom, but they know that students are not learning about all of the science surrounding evolution. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support academic freedom in the teaching of evolution in schools, and that number is rising fast ? it?s up 9% in the past 3 years. People clearly resent your demand for censorship. After all, it?s their children in their schools, and they aren?t happy with a bunch of supercilious Darwinists telling them that they can?t even question Darwinism in their own classrooms. So if you?re going to boycott all the creationists who despise you, you?ll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor. Keep up the arrogance and eventually you won?t have to boycott people at all. People will boycott you.

Well, no kidding. Basically, if they have had 150 years to make their point and haven't persuaded most people, maybe there is something wrong with the point they are trying to make.

Generally speaking, in science, if you can prove something, you don't need to hassle people about believing it. Most Americans believe that you can put a man on the moon because the Americans actually did it.

And if you cure somebody's cancer, trust me, he'll be happy to believe it.

It's different when people are expected to accept a belief system about the past history of life forms that is supported by little more than this kind of childishness.

Too bad for those guys, they won'tbe eating beignets, listening to the jazz.